Accelerated Stereo Rendering with Hybrid Reprojection-Based Rasterization and Adaptive Ray-Tracing
Proceedings of the 27th IEEE Virtual Reality conference (IEEE VR '20), IEEE, (May 2020)Best paper award 🏆.Abstract
Stereoscopic rendering is a prominent feature of virtual reality applications to generate depth cues and to provide depth perception in the virtual world. However, straight-forward stereo rendering methods usually are expensive since they render the scene from two eye-points which in general doubles the frame times. This is particularly problematic since virtual reality sets high requirements for real-time capabilities and image resolution. Hence, this paper presents a hybrid rendering system that combines classic rasteriza- tion and real-time ray-tracing to accelerate stereoscopic rendering. The system reprojects the pre-rendered left half of the stereo image pair into the right perspective using a forward grid warping technique and identifies resulting reprojection errors, which are then efficiently resolved by adaptive real-time ray-tracing. A final analysis shows that the system achieves a significant performance gain, has a neg- ligible quality impact, and is suitable even for higher rendering resolutions.
